Rails as a day job, Diesel on the side

Rails Journey

Sean Griffin shares his journey to working full-time on Rails, driven by his passion for open source and a need for better work-life balance. Initially, Sean struggled with balancing his consulting work at Thoughtbot and his desire to contribute to open source, leading him to pursue a full-time role that aligned with his interests. He explains, "I set out to switch doing it full time simply because I'm bad at convincing myself to not work" 1. Eventually, Sean found a supportive environment at Shopify, where his role focuses on open source contributions, allowing him to work on projects like Diesel, a Rust ORM, and query builder 2.

   

Active Record

Maintaining and evolving Active Record within Rails presents significant challenges, as Sean Griffin explains. Active Record, a crucial part of the Rails framework, accounts for a large portion of its complexity and issues. Sean notes, "Rewriting any small subset of active record itself is not a small undertaking" 3. Despite these challenges, he emphasizes the importance of progress, highlighting recent changes that simplify code and improve functionality, such as updates to how dirty flags are handled in callbacks 4.

   

Community & Roles

The Rails community and its culture have evolved, with Sean Griffin reflecting on the roles of developers in this ecosystem. He discusses the importance of aligning personal goals with company values, as seen in his transition from Thoughtbot to Shopify. Sean states, "I don't want to be working somewhere because it's charity" 5. He also explores the metaphor of developers as front office and back office employees, emphasizing the unique knowledge set required for maintaining frameworks like Rails 6.